The Archbishop of Canterbury has said the Church of England “failed terribly” for not reporting the head of a Christian charity accused of abusing young boys to the police.
Justin Welby admitted he had volunteered at the Christian holiday camps, run by the Iwerne Trust, at which teenage boys were groomed for abuse, but was unaware of the allegations.
The Archbishop has issued an “unreserved and unequivocal” apology on behalf of the church.
Following a six month investigation by Channel 4 News, allegations will be broadcast tonight (2 February) claiming that John Smyth QC, former head of the Iwerne Trust, had used the camps to gain access to teenage boys, whom he forced to strip naked before beating them.
"We recognise that many institutions fail catastrophically, but the Church is meant to hold itself to a far, far higher standard and we have failed terribly," read a statement issued by Lambeth Palace on behalf of the Archbishop in reaction to the revelations.
"For that the Archbishop apologises unequivocally and unreservedly to all survivors,” continued the statement, released on the evening of 1 February.
Lambeth Palace has clarified that the Archbishop became friends with Smyth in the 1970s, when Welby was a dormitory officer at one of the camps. He was not part of Smyth’s “inner circle of friends”, reads the statement. They have kept in “occasional” contact since.
Smyth is accused of cultivating small groups of followers, who he would beat with a cane at his Winchester home, supposedly to purge them of minor sins.
One of his alleged victims, Rev Mark Stibbe, now a prominent evangelical speaker and writer, told Channel 4: “It was along the lines of, this is the discipline that God likes, this is what’s going to help you to become holy.”
The assaults, which were carried out over a three year period, only came to light when one of the boys, then a student at Cambridge university, attempted suicide after being ordered to submit himself to another beating.
An investigation was launched at the time by the Iwerne Trust and carried out by Church of England vicar, Mark Ruston. Yet despite concluding that "the scale and severity of the practice was horrific", the Trust did not report Smyth to the police.
Instead a senior figure in the Iwerne Trust wrote to Smyth, telling him to leave the country, Channel 4 reports.
The Archbishop was only made aware of the allegations in 2013 when the case was eventually reported to the police by one of the abuse victims.
The Titus Trust, which absorbed the Iwerne Trust in 2000, said: “It was only in 2014 that the board of The Titus Trust was informed about this matter, after which we submitted a serious incident report to the Charity Commission and provided full disclosure to the police. The allegations are very grave and they should have been reported to the police when they first became known in 1981.”
The Church of England has repeated the Archbishop's "unreserved and unequivocal apology to all the survivors" in a statement and has said its team of six full time safeguarding officers would review all the files to see what more could have been done.
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